Critical Reappraisal: ‘Knight Rider: Trust Doesn’t Rust’

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Critical reappraisal is an essential feature of our culture, as the passage of time allows us to better analyze an artist’s or genre’s merit without the fog of hype or trends. Once scorned, impressionism eventually gained recognition as one of painting’s greatest movements; jazz went from dangerous irritant to dynamic American art form. The list of creators and creations that go from disdained to celebrated — from Moby-Dick to Chuck Close to hip-hop — seems to have no end. And to that list, one more cries out to be added: the paperback masterwork Knight Rider #2: Trust Doesn’t Rust.

Ignored in its day as a piece of spinner-rack schlock, the 1984 book, by Glen A. Larson and Roger Hill, has aged magnificently. Trust Doesn’t Rust was a novelized episode of Knight Rider, the hourlong NBC action drama that made David Hasselhoff a household name from Leipzig to Berlin. The 1980s were a golden age of such novels, from Dallas: This Cherished Land to Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Most were dubious attempts to cash in on a property’s popularity. But Trust Doesn’t Rust — much like the indomitable Hasselhoff — transcended its medium.

For those who have somehow forgotten, Knight Rider told the story of ex-military spy Michael Knight (portrayed by Hasselhoff) and the artificially intelligent KITT (portrayed by, in Wikipedia’s words, “1982 Pontiac Trans Am”). While most of the show’s episodes focused on freeway chases and orgiastic fireballs, Trust Doesn’t Rust had more on its mind: it was a prescient cautionary tale about the dangers of technology.

Trust Doesn’t Rust’s tragic villain is KARR, a Trans Am that was, like KITT, built by Knight Industries. Unlike KITT, however, KARR suffers from a programming error that makes him unstable, dangerous, and vulnerable to exploitation. When a pair of hoods activate KARR for use in a crime spree, it is up to — who else? — Knight and KITT to stop them. The divergent paths of KITT and KARR is the poignant story of East of Eden’s Cal and Aron, retold with muscle cars.

If this sounds ludicrous, I ask: isn’t anything ludicrous when you sit down to explain it? Isn’t The Odyssey just a story about a king who escapes from an island, and there’s all these gods and things, and he’s like, “I’m gonna go do some stuff?” Isn’t The Great Gatsby essentially about a guy who meets another guy, who seems pretty cool, and the guy — the first guy, not the pretty cool one — wants to hang with him? Isn’t Fifty Shades Darker, when you get down to brass tacks, about boners and whatnot?

It’s all in how the material is handled. And in Trust Doesn’t Rust, it’s handled with the effortless grace of Michael Knight taking a hairpin turn at 110. In Larson and Hill’s gifted hands, the story is elevated from stuck-on-the-toilet pastime to something crackling with vitality. Consider the introduction of the two thieves: Tony — a “streetwise young tough” and Rev — a “Skid Row winehead” — as they creep into a darkened warehouse:

Two shadows drifted across the face of the sign affixed to the building wall. The sign was comparatively new: red letters on white metal. Red letters usually meant authoritative, intimidating warnings to keep out. Neither of the shadow figures were concerned with the niceties of trespassing. The first shadow flowed across the sign and was gone; the second stopped, blacking out the message.

Not only do Larson and Hill establish the pair’s cravenness — unlike most criminals who break into off-hours industrial sites, they aren’t “concerned with the niceties of trespassing” — they educate by reminding us of the meaning of red letters, a lesson that can never be reinforced enough. And is the blacking-out of that message a metaphor for Rev’s utter disregard for authority? Is it a harbinger of doom? Was it just something they wrote to meet the word count demanded by MCA Publishing? Master’s theses have been written on less.

And what of our hero, the “relaxed and jocular” Michael Knight, who was “arrogantly handsome in a rough-hewn, rip-cord way”? While the televised Knight was the Platonic ideal of an autonomous crimefighting sportscar’s driver, Trust Doesn’t Rust allows the character to breathe, adding yet more nuance to Hasselhoff’s characterization:

Michael woke up inside an ambulance. A pert, blond paramedic was applying a bandage to his forehead. There were dots of blood on her tunic.
Michael tried to sit up and was slammed down by pain. It felt like someone had driven a cement nail into his skull just above the left eye.
“How’s Scott? He said. “The guard?”
“Guarded condition,” said the paramedic… “Hold still for a few more seconds and give the Elmer’s glue a chance to set.”
“I’ve always admired women in uniform,” he mumbled.

In one brief, magical passage, we come to understand Knight deeply, fundamentally; like Richard Price, Larson and Hill allow pitch-perfect dialogue and pinpoint description to carry the day. We learn that Knight is tough — he copes with the dreaded “cement nail” sensation –compassionate — he asks after the guarded-condition guard — and, like Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man, always able to deliver a rakish quip, no matter his predicament. He is, quite simply, a mop-topped God of Fuck.

Needless to say, Trust Doesn’t Rust’s action sequences are superb. For the climactic scene — KARR plunging headlong into the Pacific — the televised version of Trust Doesn’t Rust used footage from the film The Car, which Gene Siskel declared “The Cinematic Turkey of 1977.” Fortunately, the novel relies on Larson and Hill’s Chabonesque narrative skills:

KARR smashed into the cliffside and went end over end against the craggy rocks, its armored alloy keeping it ridiculously intact. Not even the windshield broke. Then it smacked the blue surface of the water upside down, and sank like a hammer.

A hammer — an object used to build, to construct, to create — is invoked to describe the evil auto’s demise. It is the sort of brilliant, low-key irony that Larson and Hill have threaded throughout their opus. And it is what makes Trust Doesn’t Rust an unjustly forgotten classic. So do yourself a favor: the next time you see a moldering pile of paperbacks in a Dumpster or crack-den rumpus room, dig through in search of Trust Doesn’t Rust. Immersing yourself in Larsen and Hill’s airtight prose and rousing storytelling will make you feel like one of the thieves, upon his realization that KARR could be used for ill purposes:

A limitless vista of opportunity opened up inside of Tony’s head. It was composed mostly of visions of solid food, potent booze, and — as he had said — wild, wild women. It seemed terrific.

My love of writing began in kindergarten, and so I would be remiss not to thank Mrs. Rosemary Porter and everyone at Chester Arthur Elementary School, from Principal Tucker to Esmeralda from the lunchroom, not to mention all of my classmates. Wherever all of you are, I hope you know that you have not been forgotten and your efforts to include me in your spirited games of kickball were not in vain.

1.
“Junot Díaz’sBrief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao...is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
The “author x meets author y” formula and other such tropes (novelists crossing, mating, or being used in recipes) can be as incisive and fun as they are inane and reductive. But above all, critical assessments like the one above demonstrate how small the literary world is: artists past and present are always bumping into each other. (Indeed, if reviews and blurbs are to be believed, writers like Elmore Leonard, Philip K. Dick, and P.G. Wodehouse still have positively brutal social schedules.) Inspired by the apparent gregariousness of the novel, I set out to conceive of and review the most convivial work imaginable, The Summit (an entirely fictional work of fiction).
2.The Summit is a highly allusive text, The Norton Anthology of American Literature meets The Oxford Book of English Verse meets Justin Halpern’sSh*t My Dad Says. Should that sound too fusty, the novel could just as easily be described as Philip Roth meets Nathan Zuckerman, with a run-in with Peter Tarnopol thrown in for good measure: a true meeting of minds.
The more you interact with someone, the more you refine your opinion of that person. The same holds true for literature. Upon rereading the book, I would say that it’s more Marcel Proust meets James Joyce, except that those two writers did actually meet at a Parisian dinner party. It did not go well. Provisional final answer then: The Summit is Thomas Pynchon meets J.D. Salinger, ironic given that that both are recluses, and the latter is dead.
In terms of historical significance, The Summit's publication falls somewhere between the Yalta Conference, at which Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin convened to discuss post-War Europe, and this year’s Baseball Winter Meetings, at which the Yankees shored up their bullpen by signing a pitcher, Andrew Miller, whom Brian Cashman touted as Ron Guidry meets Emily Dickinson.
Now that we know what kind of novel we’re dealing with, let’s get to its constituent parts. The Summit is one part Künstlerroman, one part roman à clef and one part dystopian fable. It is best enjoyed while munching on a nice summer salad with a simple homemade dressing (3 parts oil, 1 part vinegar).
The tale is a soupy mix: take a nice Franzian broth, add a dash of Michael Connelly, a pinch of the spicy James (E.L. not Henry), thicken it up with some Karl Ove Knausgård and garnish with a sprig of Dorothy Parker. Simmer, then serve immediately in a discarded Chipotle cup with a Jonathan Safran Foer quote printed on it.
For those who either hate soup or excelled in high school math, feel free to conceive of the novel instead as the sum of a geometric series of influences that converges to The Summit as n approaches infinity: 1/2 Jennifer Weiner, 1/4 Don DeLillo, 1/8 Gillian Flynn, 1/16 John Milton, 1/32 Maurice Sendak, with the endless remaining fractions representing authors whose work has been reissued by The New York Review of Books.
The Summit’s protagonists are a bubbly matchmaker and a socially awkward computer programmer. After meeting cute while delivering elevator pitches, they go on to develop a revolutionary dating site -- think Tinder meets the old New Republic. When their algorithm identifies the odd pair as a perfect romantic match, it disrupts everything they thought they knew about love and coding. Following the delightful spasms of their mating dance, a cross between that of a bird of paradise and a flamingo, feels like listening in on a freewheeling jam session between Richard Powers, William Gibson, and Nora Roberts (featuring Nicki Minaj.)
Nix that. I feel like I’m merely scratching the surface. This novel deserves a spelunking critic willing to perform a combination of tomb raiding and close reading to plumb its depths: a Lara Croft-James Wood adventure-cum-review.
Here’s my last attempt, even if it remains woefully vague. If Frankenstein’s monster had been assembled using the body parts of Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Daniel Defoe, then been allowed to reproduce with the female monster the doctor had begun to assemble from the limbs of Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and Anne Radcliffe, and one of their descendents had evolved in such a way as to viably mate with a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop -- without the aid of in-vitro fertilization -- then The Summit would be the second novel of that spawn. (We can all agree the debut novel of this hypothetical creature would have been a mess.)
I could be wrong of course; perhaps no book, or novelist, is like any other. Best to follow Rudyard Kipling’s lead and simply state that The Summit is East, all other novels are West, and never the twain shall meet.
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